“Hey, Chief,” he whispered, gesturing to an ‘unfamiliar figure in a white open-necked shirt whose collar was pressed down over the lapels of his blue suit, “who’s the new girl in town?”
Feldman’s eyes followed his glance. “Israeli intelligence,” he answered.
“Mossad.”
In the interrogation room itself, the Arab, his handcuffs removed, was perched warily on the edge of the sofa. Frank Farrell, the Bureau’s Palestinian expert, was pouring coffee as gaily, Angelo thought in disgust, as a waitress serving breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge. The second FBI agent in the room, Leo Shannon, a genial New York Irishman who specialized in interrogations and terrorist negotiations, reached into his pocket and laid a white card on the table. Angelo groaned.
“Would you believe it?” he said to the Chief of Detectives. “Guy wants to blow up some gas that’s going to kill Christ knows how many people in this city, and they got to give him the fucking card?”
Feldman gave a resigned shrug of his shoulders. The “card” was the slip of paper all New York policemen and FBI agents carry bearing the warning to a prisoner of his civil rights based on the Supreme Court’s Miranda decision.
Shannon “gave” it to him by informing the Arab he could remain silent if he chose or refuse to talk except in the presence of a lawyer. Everyone in the control booth tensed. It was a critical moment. Their efforts to find Qaddafi’s hydrogen bomb could come to a dead halt right here. If the man asked for a lawyer it might be hours before they could start to question him, hours more before they could make a deal with his lawyer to let him off in return for talking.
Whether from ignorance of the law or indifference, the Arab gave Shannon a halfhearted wave of his hand. He didn’t need any lawyers, he said as the men in the booth sighed gratefully. He had nothing to say to anybody.
Behind Angelo, the door to the control booth opened. An agent in shirtsleeves stepped in, blinked a second in the shadows, then stepped over to Dewing. “We’ve got a sheet on him from the prints,” he announced triumphantly.
The men in the booth tightened into a knot around the FBI’s assistant director, forgetting for a moment the scene on the other side of the one-way glass. As soon as the Arab’s fingerprints had been taken they had been sent to FBI headquarters in Washington, where the memory bank of the Bureau’s IBM computer compared them with millions of prints taken from everyone arrested in the country during the past ten years. A second computer out at Langley put them into a CIA IBM containing all the fingerprints of Palestinian terrorists available to the world’s intelligence agencies. That machine had registered “tilt” three minutes after ingesting the prints. It had identified them as belonging to Nabil Suleiman. He had been born in Bethlehem in 1951 and had been picked up and printed first by the Israelis after an antigovernment demonstration at Jerusalem’s Arab College in 1969. In 1972 he had been arrested for possession of a firearm and given six months in jail. Released, he had disappeared for six months, an absence subsequently traced by Mossad to one of George Habbash’s PFLP training camps in Lebanon. In 1975 he had been identified by an informer as one of two men who left a charge of explosives in a shopping basket in Jerusalem’s Mahne Yehuda open-air market. Three elderly women had been killed and seventeen other people injured in the explosion. Since then he had vanished from sight.
“Did you run his prints past State and the INS?” Dewing asked as he compared the photograph attached to the file with the man in the interrogation booth.
“Yes, sir,” the agent who had brought the file answered. “There’s no record of a visa. He’s an illegal.”
Inside the interrogation room, the Arab was giving his address as the Century Hotel, 844 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn. “Get a couple of our cars down there right away,” Hudson ordered, hearing his words. They were, for all practical purposes, the last the Arab intended to speak for some time.
Overtaken by some shift in his mood, he muttered, “I want a lawyer,” to the two FBI men before him, then refused to speak any further.
Angelo studied the Arab. Scared, he mused, scared absolutely shitless. His failure with Benny the Fence in front of Rand still rankled. The young agent was in the shadows behind him, somehow more at ease in these corridors of officialdom than Angelo was.
Angelo leaned toward Feldman. “Chief,” he whispered, “let me have ten minutes with him while they’re running down a lawyer. After all, he’s mine, isn’t he?”
Five minutes later, Angelo settled into the chair opposite the Arab with a weary sigh and a complaint about the heat in the room. He took a sack of Planter’s Peanuts out of his pocket and spilled a mound into his palm.
“Peanut, kid?” he asked. Closed up like an oyster, the detective thought, watching the Arab defiantly shake his head. Angelo tossed half the handful into his mouth and offered it again to the prisoner. “Go on. You don’t need a lawyer to eat a peanut … Nabil.”
He had held off on the name, then came down hard on it, his eyes fixed on the Arab’s face as he pronounced it. He saw him start as though he had received a jolt of static electricity. Angelo sat back in his armchair and slowly chewed the rest of the peanuts, deliberately allowing the Arab time to reflect on the fact that his real identity was known. Finally, he cleaned his hands with a little clap and leaned forward.
“Kid, you know, different guys got different ways of operating.” He used the same husky, confidential voice he had employed unsuccessfully with Benny. “Bureau’s got their way. I got mine. Me, I say always level with a guy. Let him know where he’s at.”
“I don’t want to talk,” the Arab snarled.
“Talk?” Angelo laughed. “Who asked you to talk? Just listen.” He settled back in his chair again. “Now, what we got you on here is receiving stolen goods. Bunch of plastic Benny Moscowitz got for you on consignment Friday a week for five hundred dollars.” Angelo paused and gave the Arab a friendly smile. “By the way, kid, you paid too much. Two and a half’s the going price.”
He could have been a priest trying to talk a young husband out of a divorce. “You can figure that’s one to three, depending on your sheet and the judge. Now, the matter of interest to us here is not that. It’s where it went. Who you did it for.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk.” There had been no softening in the Arab’s defiant tone.
“Don’t, kid. You don’t have to. You heard what the card says.” Reassurance dripped from Angelo’s voice. He thoughtfully munched a couple of peanuts, then jerked his head toward the New York mural on the wall to his left. “See that?” he asked.